


Cruel Summer

by withered



Series: Roses (by another name) [17]
Category: Bleach
Genre: Alternate Universe - Mythology, F/M, Grief, Selectively Mute Character, orpheus and eurydice au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-28
Updated: 2020-05-28
Packaged: 2021-03-03 05:41:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,990
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24419833
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/withered/pseuds/withered
Summary: Rukia's always known him.
Relationships: Kuchiki Rukia/Kurosaki Ichigo
Series: Roses (by another name) [17]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/843906
Comments: 24
Kudos: 62





	Cruel Summer

**Author's Note:**

> So, this fic is loosely based on the Orpheus and Eurydice myth - if you're unfamiliar with it: 
> 
> Orpheus, the son of Apollo, a talented musician, falls in love with a young woman named Eurydice. They marry and live happily, though they only have a short while together before Eurydice is attacked and killed. Orpheus, heartbroken, plays his instrument in his anguish, and Apollo, stricken with his son's sadness, tells him to go to Hades and get Eurydice back. The journey to the Underworld is a lot more precarious as Orpheus performs to offset the hostility he faces, but the titular point is Hades telling Orpheus to leave the Underworld and that so long as he doesn't look back, Eurydice will leave with him. Unfortunately, he becomes anxious on the journey back up to the living world, and eventually turns around to look for her, and thus loses her again. 
> 
> The ending differs, but this fic focuses more on Ichigo and Rukia's time together rather than the journey of getting to and from the Underworld. I figured it would be less sad that way.

From a young age, it's obvious that Ichigo is his mother's son. A fact he holds with great pride even when he's teased for the color of his hair.

His mother is his everything, and Masaki loves him just as much as he does her, any other opinion matters naught.

There is little evidence beyond the hint of what his features could be one day that the god, Isshin, is his sire, until of course, Ichigo learns to speak.

While Masaki's voice had always been praised for its beauty — it had, after all, gotten her the attention and affections of a god — Ichigo transcends even her: Flowers bloom at his gentle coaxing while birds harmonize with his hums; the world holds its breath just to listen, and it's decided then and there that Ichigo does his parents proud, his village honors them both and Isshin honors them most.

Unfortunately, that kind of good fortune is short lived.

Ichigo meets loss young.

At a concert held for celebration of a successful Spring season, him and his mother both are attacked in front of all and sundry with a speed that not even Isshin can stop.

In the chaos, Ichigo's small body, soaked with his mother's blood, is wrecked with a grief so bone deep his cries of anguish carve his voice right out of his chest. The sound howls and haunts, and for days after it's like Ichigo's sucked the color right out of their surroundings with every shuddering inhale he takes, though no words escape him.

Eventually, Ichigo begins to speak again at the gentle prodding of his sisters, but he will not sing, and no one, not even his father, can induce him to it.

No one in their village speaks of Ichigo's lost gift, partially out of respect for Masaki and partially out of fear that Isshin will bring their home to ruin for allowing her death to occur at all which is why every new resident to Karakura is warned about the Kurosaki family — to stay away, and if it cannot be helped, to not speak to them at all especially to the son.

This is not a warning Rukia is given, at least not with the way she appears in Karakura, in the Kurosaki home, of all places.

She's small in Ichigo's arms when he finds her on the trail between the village and his family's home. Brought in from the cold of a winter that snapped and fractured in her too blue eyes once she rouses from her icy slumber to find the Kurosaki family watching over her.

His sisters grow quickly fond of her; a feat that isn't difficult given the circumstance of how starved for company that isn't the other they are.

But Rukia is. Nice.

She doesn't know their family's ties to the god who is their father, nor the gift that Ichigo had scorned in the wake of their mother's death. Rukia doesn't walk on egg shells around them or treats them like the villagers have.

It's nice to not be known, a fact that is extended to her in kind.

There is little Ichigo is aware of about her from before discovering her all all, and he doesn't ask. But as the days go by, he recognizes the halting stillness in Rukia, the shiny glaze in her gaze, and the aching way she watches them interact with one another when she thinks no one is watching her back.

Ichigo thinks they are similar in their tragedy, or at the very least, that their losses must rhyme.

When Rukia catches his eye, there's a moment of frozen realization then a hunted look that just barely shutters the vulnerability behind suspicion before she recognizes what he doesn't say — and hasn't spoken of in years — and her body droops like the strings of her are cut loose. He doesn't know if it's the result of sadness — that whatever she was running from could be found in others — or the relief that whatever led her to them is something that can be understood by anyone else at all.

Either way, Ichigo finds himself reveling in the contradiction of being both known and not.

When it comes to Rukia, it's a state of being he quickly becomes used to.

It's present in the way she teases replies out of him, unaware of the feat or the way his sister look at her in awe. In how he's begrudgingly roped into teaching her how to do chores when she insists that she should help around the house since they're letting her stay, and: "Obviously you're staying whether you help with them or not," Ichigo scoffs, "I found you asleep outside in the middle of Winter. Can't trust you on your own, midget. You'd probably freeze to death, given half the chance."

"You'll never let that go, will you?" She complains in turn, and when that gets him to snort, she looks so pleased by it that he wonders how she could have known when the last time that happened.

How sometimes in the unforgiving chill of the night, he wakes with a face sticky with tears, and Rukia is there with a tea that smells like the Summer Ichigo hasn't enjoyed since his mother died.

Rukia knows them in unknowable ways:

Humming along to Karin's flute playing and never asking why her songs so obviously lack a vocal accompaniment because, "It sounds whole because it's you" which makes Karin smile so wide there's a passing concern her face will split in two. It is with the same careless kindness that she unquestionably accepts Yuzu's tears whenever Rukia so much as thanks her for something, unable to process the emotion that rushes up to the surface and sends Yuzu gasping like a drowned man with its first taste of air at the simple acknowledgment of effort offered.

For Ichigo, the effect is far more potent.

Rukia's compassion and how she loves them is familiar and alien at once, and Ichigo thinks with growing fascinated fear as Winter dies, _oh. Oh, this will hurt._

It's a thrilling sort of terror. It makes him bolder. It makes him reckless.

She catches him singing to himself one day as the flowers begin to grow again, and for once, there's no smart retort on her tongue only a quiet smile and a pair of blue eyes to drown in, saying, "You're layers upon layers, aren't you?"

Being known by Rukia is like glimpsing the first ray of sunlight after a long night, the rest of the world growing steadily brighter with the curve of her smile, the petal softness of her lips against his, and the warm give of her skin beneath his palms.

He feels like he's both flying apart and being sewn back together; trying to fight it is futile. Falling in love with her, he realizes, is a consequence of existence.

Ichigo is alive and he can't imagine being that way without loving her as well.

He begins to know her in other ways — the sweet huff of breath she exhales, the welcoming warmth between her thighs, the relieved arch of her spine. Skimming a path from the gentle dip of her collarbone, down the valley of her breasts to her soft belly, he tells her she's lovely and Rukia sighs his name.

Ensnared in a net of stars with nothing but the moonlight between them, he serenades her, and the world holds its breath.

In the morning, and every morning thereafter, Ichigo goes to his father's shrine. He makes his offerings until he's practically a pauper, demanding and begging and pleading for _more time, more days, more nights, please don't take her away, please —_

But even a god is nothing to the Fates, and once a string is cut, nothing can take a soul out of Death's grasp.

And oh, _it hurts._

It hurts to breathe and blink and know Rukia when she isn't there to be known.

He's angry and he's in pain, and he tells his father to fix it, to bring her back — or bring him to her — but Death themselves answers in Isshin's stead, "Like father like son, I see."

"What will it take?" Ichigo demands skipping any formalities since Death has likely heard all of his very creative threats thus far.

"Cross the veil," Death replies, "and know that between your entry and exit for every ten minutes spent there, your life will be forfeit one month at a time." Then, considering, Death adds, "I'd like a song on your way while you're here. You do your mother proud with your gift."

And though that hurts too in a different way, for Rukia, Ichigo would break his heart in a thousand lifetimes. But when he reaches his destination, Death reveals that they cannot alter their nature, but they would attempt a compromise, "Leave the veil from whence you came, you won't be harmed, and she will follow you. But don't glance back to look for her or she will be out of reach."

Ichigo has no choice but to obey, and begins his journey back to the land of the living.

He can't run, it makes no difference here, and for all that the road is flat and easy, though endlessly long, the yawning silence entombed around him grates. Ichigo begins to wonder if he's being taken for a fool — that he would walk out of Death's domain so docilely with Rukia not even with him to begin with, a grousing that is answered with Rukia's whisper in the quiet, "You were a fool to come."

His heart leaps to his throat, but he scowls nonetheless. "Of course I came, I couldn't just leave you."

"You didn't," Rukia says and he can hear the sad smile in her voice. "It isn't about leaving or being left; it's simply time."

"Time is a joke."

Her hum is a laugh at his audacity, and Ichigo wants nothing more than to turn around and bask in it — the way it lights up her eyes and pulls at her mouth and sends her shoulders shaking.

His breath hitches at the memory of it, already fading because he can't remember the exact shade of blue of her eyes or which corner of her lip would twitch first or which hand she gently shoved him with — "Time is taking you from me, just like Death did."

"Time and Death have no intent, they just are," she tells him smartly, "Like the sun rising and setting, or the horizon moving further the closer you get to it."

He huffs, "I wish we had more time. I wish that Death was not our master."

"Ichigo," And his name said like that stops him short because he knows that intonation, the sharpness of the vowels. "You're going to run out of time if you linger any longer. I need you to...I need you to look at me."

"I can't let you go," he tells her, and his eyes feel hot, and his body is trembling but he feels her embrace at his back, the phantom press of her lips against his neck.

"Then don't," she says in a murmur. "There will be other lives beyond this one, you don't need to waste the life you have now just for me." And turning at her touch, he's faced with the ghost of her smile and a caress of her lips as she breaths, "We'll meet again, I promise." 

As she starts to dissolve like ash in the wind before his eyes, his hand grasping — body begging, _stay stay stay —_ he tells her, "I'll always come for you. In every lifetime, in every reality. I'll come. Nothing will change that. Not Time, and not Death." To the Winter in her eyes, the Spring in her lips and the cruel warmth of Summer in her fleeting touch, Ichigo vows, "I'll come for you." 

**Author's Note:**

> Grey, who does not ship Ichiruki, saw the snippet of Ichigo's declaration on tumblr and straight said, "Is that not canon" and I --


End file.
